A 25-year-old man has followed in the footsteps of Harrow pirate Emmanuel Nimley after being convicted of using his phone to illegally record movies in a Glasgow cinema.

The conviction is said to be the first of its kind in Scotland, after Christopher Clarke of Keppochhill Road, Sighthill, pleaded guilty on 2 June to a charge under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

He was ordered at the Glasgow Sheriff Court yesterday to complete 160 hours of community service.

Police, Cineworld, and the Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT) teamed up to catch Clarke.

FACT said its investigators discovered that Clarke had recorded the entire Robin Hood movie on 12 May 2010 during a press screening of the Ridley Scott film.

The court heard that Clarke had previously uploaded to the internet five other movies he had illegally recorded in cinemas.

In October of last year, then 22-year-old Lincoln Road, Harrow-based Nimley, who had been thrown in jail for six months for fraudulently filming Hollywood films at a Vue cinema, saw his sentence successfully quashed on appeal to a 12-month community order.

The North West Londoner was told to carry out 120 hours of unpaid work during that period.

As we reported at the time, there have been recent successful court actions against the recordings of films in Blighty cinemas, with prosecutors citing the Fraud Act. Nimley’s sentence was seen as a big win for FACT.

However, no jail term was secured against the Harrow pirate, following appeal. Meanwhile, Clarke received only 160 hours of community service.

The Cinema Exhibitors' Association and other flick-industry bodies have long complained that the UK government lags behind Europe and the US because there’s no specific legislation that can be used in a charge such as the one against Nimley or Clarke. ®